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Moving Right Along

So, you've now seen how you can create and modify your game environment. The three main environmental elements are Sky, Clouds, and Water. We looked at the different ways each of those three elements can be created using tools and techniques available in Torque.

In most cases, you will probably use some form of all of those techniques when you create your game. For example, you would judiciously mix overhead cloud layers with skybox renderings of distant clouds on the horizon.

We've also looked at the combined weather effects involved in storms, and how you can initiate an automated process to start and end storms over time using Torque Script.

In this chapter, we were introduced to sounds in the form of thunder for the lightning strikes. In the next chapter we will more thoroughly explore how to incorporate sounds in our game.

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chapter 19

Creating and

Programming Sound

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, audio artists compose the music and sound in a game. Good designers work with creative and inspired audio artists to create musical compositions that intensify the game experience.

It also bears repeating that audio artists work closely with the game designers determining where the sound effects are needed and what the character of the sounds should be. They often spend quite a bit of time experimenting with sound-effect sources, looking for different ways to generate the precise sound needed. Visit an audio artist at work and you might catch him slapping rulers and dropping boxes in front of a microphone. After capturing the basic sound, an audio artist will then massage the sound with sound-editing tools, varying the pitch, speeding up the sound or slowing it down, removing unwanted noise, and so on. It's often a tightrope walk balancing realistic sounds with the need sometimes to exaggerate certain characteristics in order to make the right point in the game context.

When creating your game, you have a choice between two basic approaches: obtain a good source of sound effects and music (like an audio library) or create your own sounds. Of course, you also have the option to combine the two approaches. Audio libraries are available from a wide variety of sources, and the commercial ones are quite thorough and professionally made. There are audio libraries available via the Internet for free, but the quality of these sources varies widely in breadth, depth, and recording fidelity.

In this book we are going to take the do-it-yourself approach. The main advantage of going this way is the price; a secondary advantage is that you have total control over the contents of your sound files.

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540 Chapter 19 ■ Creating and Programming Sound

Audacity

There are several tools available to use for recording and editing sound effects and music. A very good open source program—it doesn't cost you anything to use and is made available under the GNU General Public License—is Audacity.

This chapter will show you how to use Audacity (see Figure 19.1) to make sounds for use in your game.

Installing Audacity

To install Audacity, do the following:

1.Browse to your CD in the \Audacity directory.

2.Locate the audacity-win-1_0_0.exe file and double-click it to run it.

3.Click the Next button for the Welcome screen.

4.Follow the various screens, and take the default options for each one, unless you know you have a specific reason to do otherwise.

Using Audacity

You need to ensure that you've got your microphone set up properly—connected to the MIC or microphone input jack on your sound card. Of course, you don't need to obtain your sounds directly from a microphone; you can record from a CD or another audio source. In any event, you need to have that source connected to the correct input and ensure that your audio mixer is set up to record from that source. You should refer to your sound card documentation if you don't know how to do this.

The basic operation of Audacity is quite straightforward for recording, simple editing, playback, and saving your data.

Recording

Let's record some sound:

shown in Figure 19.2.

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The program is now recording from the microphone. You can see the progress of the recording and the waveforms of the sounds in the window as the recording proceeds, as shown in Figure 19.3.

3. Speak into the microphone, or if you

Figure 19.2 The Record button.

don't want to hear your own voice, make a noise, like slapping a book down on the desk or something. You will see the sound you made appear in the waveform. Figure 19.4 shows the waveform created when I tapped a pen on the desk next to the microphone.

4.When you have your sound recorded, click the

5.Now you can play back your recording, by clicking the Play button, as shown in Figure 19.6.

We'll continue working with Audacity in a moment, but first I want to point out that if you have a waveform but don't hear any sound, make sure that you have the volume turned up high enough in your speakers.

Also be sure that it is turned up high Figure 19.4 Waveform in Audacity. enough—and is not muted—in your

Windows Volume Control applet (in the Control Panel, and usually on the Windows System Tray on the right side of the taskbar).

Simple Editing

Now if you're like me you probably have a long period Figure 19.5 Stop recording. of dead air before the sound effect you made and

another chunk afterward. That's fine, because it's easy to fix. So, picking up where we left off in the previous section:

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542 Chapter 19 ■ Creating and Programming Sound

There are other export options available, but we'll stick with the WAV format for its simplicity and wide availability on Windows platforms. For other platforms, Ogg Vorbis is probably the format of choice on Linux, and AIFF for Macintosh.

Audacity Reference

This section contains some useful reference details to help you use Audacity.

The Main Screen

Figure 19.9 shows the Audacity main screen, with the major components labeled. This section will provide some detail on those components.

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544 Chapter 19 ■ Creating and Programming Sound

Table 19.2 Track Panel Tools

Table 19.3 Track Types

Audacity supports three different track types that can be viewed simultaneously when they exist in a single channel. These three track types let you view waveform, MIDI information, and label information for a given audio file. Table 19.3 describes each of the three types.

n o t e

Common values for audio sample rates are shown in Table 19.4.

Table 19.4 Common Sample Rates

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Menus

The Audacity menus provide access to functions for managing files, editing, adjusting views, managing Audacity projects, and finally, creating special effects. There is also a standard Help menu.

The File Menu

Figure 19.10 shows the File menu, and Table 19.5 contains an itemized description of the menu. Note that menu items that have names ending with three ellipsis points (three dots) will bring up a dialog box where you can fill in some parameters.

The Edit Menu

Figure 19.11 shows the Edit menu, and Table 19.6 contains an itemized description of the menu. Parts of this menu contain the standard Cut, Copy, and Paste functions; the rest are related functions that are specific to Audacity's capabilities.

The View Menu

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546 Chapter 19 ■ Creating and Programming Sound

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Table 19.7 View Menu

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